December 22, 2010

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Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) patiently presided Wednesday as his Senate colleagues made their final remarks before voting 71 to 26 to ratify the new START treaty.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Kerry had been on the Senate floor for about 70 hours since START debate began last Wednesday, aides calculated.

In shepherding the U.S.-Russian arms control pact through the Senate, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations panel held over twenty meetings and had over thirty phone calls with figures integral to the process, including Vice President Joe Biden, key Republican Senate negotiators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Bob Corker (R-Tenn), in the past week.

Until recent days, however, the only Republican senator who had openly declared that he would support the treaty was Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking Republican on the foreign relations panel and a long-time leader on U.S.-Russian arms control who in 2004 took then Sen. Barack Obama on his first Codel trip to see Russian nuclear sites.

In the end, while Kerry, Lugar and the administration were able to get 13 Republican Senators -- more than the ten needed -- to ratify new START, not among the Republican ayes were Kyl, McCain or Graham. (Corker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations panel, voted both for the treaty in committee and for ratification this week, as did his fellow Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander. Their state, Tennessee, houses Oak Ridge nuclear facility which stands to gain from some of the $85 billion in nuclear complex modernization funds the Obama administration has committed to invest over the next ten years as part of its effort to get Republican support for the treaty.)

Historically bipartisan efforts to push “back the dark frontier of nuclear conflict … have not always been perfect,” Kerry said in his final remarks before the final vote. “Nothing in life or policy ever is. But as we end this debate now, let us take our own step forward for America and for the world.”

“As stewards of enormous destructive power, we too can become the stewards of peace,” Kerry concluded.

“One does not have to abandon one’s skepticism of the Russian government or dismiss contentious foreign policy disagreements with Moscow to invest in the practical enterprise of nuclear verification and transparency,” Lugar said in his closing remarks. “In fact, it is precisely the friction in our broader relationship that makes this treaty so important.”

Vice President Biden then presided over the final Senate roll call vote on the treaty, for which Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) returned after undergoing cancer surgery Monday.

"John Kerry impressed many in the administration with his adept handling of the floor debate," one non-proliferation hand said Wednesday on condition of anonymity. "He often was a lonely voice on the Senate floor, playing defense against hordes of Republican amendments with little backup from other Democrats. He demonstrated intelligence, agile debating skills, command of his facts, passion when called for, and a wry sense of humor at other times.

"If indeed he is gunning for Secretary of State in a second term, the past month has bolstered his cause," the nonproliferation hand continued, adding that he was also impressed with the advocacy for START played by freshman Democratic senators Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)

Praising the "internationalist coalition that passed this treaty," moderate Republican foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan nevertheless lamented that several key Republican senators had ultimately voted against the treaty.

"Even Obama-hating Republicans need to remember that we have only one president at a time, and it's in our national interest that he be regarded around the world as someone who can speak and act with broad national support," Kagan wrote at the Washington Post.

McCain, in a statement explaining his no vote, said despite "great work and goodwill by colleagues on both sides of the aisle" to address his concerns that the treaty not limit U.S. missile defenses, he and the administration were not in the end able to come to agreement. Though McCain, Kerry, Kyl and Biden and aides were said to be negotiating through Tuesday night, by then the administration knew it already had more than the ten Republican votes it needed to ratify the treaty.

But Tennessee's Corker said Republican engagement with the administration over the treaty had yielded sufficient assurances on missile defense and funding for the nuclear complex to warrant ratification. Or as he put it in his floor speech Tuesday, "can we (Republicans) say 'yes' to yes?"

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It has just been reported that out of all the nuclear arms treaties that have ever been approved, this one received the lowest support total.
My fear is that sometime over the next year or so the negotiating records will become fully public and supporters of the treaty will learn of something, like Obamacare, that may have made them vote a bit differently.

It is a shame Senator McCain couldn't get over his bitterness and pride and vote in favor of this treaty. He just can't seem to vote for anything our President does-even though, deep down he knows it is right. Stuborn and pigheaded comes to mind.
But, in the end, the best possible outcome was achieved-without McCain.

It is increasingly apparent to me that Senators Joh Kyl and John McCain are no longer suited to hold the offices to which they were elected. Neither Senator truthfully represented their constituents by assuming adversarial positions to the ratification of the START Treaty. Their actions, in my opinion, were prompted by their desire to retain the "GOOD OLE BOY" politicking, and their collective desire to make President Obama look bad. Both intents are clearly contrary to what is best for our country. Our new Congress has to learn how to work in a collaborative manner, tapping the best intellect available, to hopefully resolve some of the very serious problems that the Congressional activity of the past three decades has caused. "Good Ole Boy" politicians who want to maintain the "red-blue" parochial mind set - voting blindly along "party" lines, and attempting to "punish" individuals in their own "party" who have the audacity
to work with colleagues "across the aisle", simply have no place in contemporary government. They need to be voted out of office. Dale

Posted By: It is increasingly apparent to me that Senators Joh Kyl and John McCain are no longer suited to hold | December 22, 2010 at 06:01 PM

START is a pyrrhic victory, kabuki theater for lawmakers and diplomats kept in the dark -- because the agreement does not cover the "new" nukes" -- awesome, invisible scalar and particle beam microwave radio frequency directed energy weapons systems developed under the subterfuge of "surveillance" and "missile defense."

The Russians, the Chinese, the British and we Americans have these weapon systems in our military-intel arsenal -- and worldwide, one iteration is being used to silently assault, impair, injure, debilitate, subjugate and induce illness upon extrajudicially targeted CIVILIAN POPULATIONS -- including right here in the U.S.A.

Wake up, lawmakers, before YOU are targeted -- like this veteran journalist:

You have to be a liberal to be so dumb as to believe that this START Treaty is worth the paper that it's written on. Russia is not the old cold war enemy, the USSR, any more, and we have nothing to fear from them. A lot of the countries that once made up the USSR are now on our side. Our enemies today are the Islamic terrorists, and the Communist Chinese, and their puppet North Korea. While Russia is politically against us, and will always vote against our interests in the UN, their nuclear arsenal is strictly for defense only. They're probably more worried what the Chinese Communists and N. Korea might do, than what we will do. A START Treaty with the Communist Chinese makes sense, but one with Russia is just feel-good symbolism..

A typical article from Laura "Conservatives are Bozos" Rozen, quoting people on HER (the Obama pro-treaty) side 235 words, versus 12 from opponents.
Laura must think the case for START is weak, because she makes sure to censor any opposing arguments.